With david levithan dutton books

 
 
 

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CHAPTER SEVEN 
I
screamed to wake up my parents, and they burst into the room, but there was nothing they 
could do to dim the supernovae exploding inside my brain, an endless chain of intracranial 
firecrackers that made me think that I was once and for all going, and I told myself
—as I’ve
told myself before
—
that the body shuts down when the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is 
temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn’t slip away. I was left on the shore
with the waves washing over me, unable to drown. 
Dad drove, talking on the phone with the hospital, while I lay in the back with my head in 
Mom’s lap. There was nothing to do: Screaming made it worse. All stimuli made it worse,
actually. 
The only solution was to try to unmake the world, to make it black and silent and 
uninhabited again, to return to the moment before the Big Bang, in the beginning when there 
was the Word, and to live in that vacuous uncreated space alone with the Word. 
People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I had 
been poked and stabbed and poisoned for years, and still I trod on. But make no mistake: In 
that moment, I would have been very, very happy to die.
I woke up in the ICU. I could tell I was in the ICU because I didn’t have my own room, and
because there was so much 
beeping, and because I was alone: They don’t let your family stay
with you 24/7 in the ICU at Children’s because it’s an infection risk. There was wailing down
the hall. Somebody’s kid had died. I was alone. I hit the red call button.
A nurse came in seco
nds later. “Hi,” I said.
“Hello, Hazel. I’m Alison, your nurse,” she said.
“Hi, Alison My Nurse,” I said.
Whereupon I started to feel pretty tired again. But I woke up a bit when my parents came 
in, crying and kissing my face repeatedly, and I reached up for them and tried to squeeze, but 
my everything hurt when I squeezed, and Mom and Dad told me that I did not have a brain 
tumor, but that my headache was caused by poor oxygenation, which was caused by my lungs 
swimming in fluid, a liter and a half (!!!!) of which had been successfully drained from my 
chest, which was why I might feel a slight discomfort in my side, where there was, 
hey look at 
that
, a tube that went from my chest into a plastic bladder half full of liquid that for all the 
world resembled m
y dad’s favorite amber ale. Mom told me I was going to go home, that I
really was, that I would just have to get this drained every now and again and get back on the 
BiPAP, this nighttime machine that forces air in and out of my crap lungs. But I’d had a t
otal 
body PET scan on the first night in the hospital, they told me, and the news was good: no 

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tumor growth. No new tumors. My shoulder pain had been lack-of-oxygen pain. Heart-
working-too-hard pain. 
“Dr. Maria said this morning that she remains optimistic,” Dad said. I liked Dr. Maria,
and she didn’t bullshit you, so that felt good to hear.
“This is just a thing, Hazel,” my mom said. “It’s a thing we can live with.”
I nodded, and then Alison My Nurse kind of politely made them leave. She asked me if I 
wanted some ice chips, and I nodded, and then she sat at the bed with me and spooned them 
into my mouth. 
“So you’ve been gone a couple days,” Alison said. “Hmm, what’d you miss
. . . A 
celebrity did drugs. Politicians disagreed. A different celebrity wore a bikini that revealed a 
bodily imperfection. A team won a sporting event, but another team lost.” I smiled. “You can’t
go disappearing on everybody like this, Hazel. You miss too much.”
“More?” I asked, nodding toward the white Styrofoam cup in her hand.
“I shouldn’t,” she said, “but I’m a rebel.” She gave me another plastic spoonful of crushed
ice. I mumbled a thank-
you. Praise God for good nurses. “Getting tired?” she asked. I nodded.
“Sleep for a while,” she said. “I’ll try to run interference and give you
a couple hours before 
somebody comes in to check vitals and the like.” I said Thanks again. You say thanks a lot in a
hospital. I tried to settle into the bed. “You’re not gonna ask about your boyfriend?” she asked.
“Don’t have one,” I told her.
“Well, there’s a kid who has hardly left the waiting room since you got here,” she said.
“He hasn’t seen me like this, has he?”
“No. Family only.”
I nodded and sank into an aqueous sleep.
It would take me six days to get home, six undays of staring at acoustic ceiling tile and 
watching television and sleeping and pain and wishing for time to pass. I did not see Augustus 
or anyone other than my parents. My hair looked like a bird’s nest;; my
shuffling gait like a 
dementia patient’s. I felt a little better each day, though: Each sleep ended to reveal a person
who seemed a bit more like me. Sleep fights cancer, Regular Dr. Jim said for the thousandth 
time as he hovered over me one morning surrounded by a coterie of medical students. 
“Then I am a cancer
-
fighting machine,” I told him.
“That you are, Hazel. Keep resting, and hopefully we’ll get you home soon.”

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On Tuesday, they told me I’d go home on Wednesday. On Wednesday, two minimally
supervised medical students removed my chest tube, which felt like getting stabbed in reverse 
and generally didn’t go very well, so they decided I’d have to stay until Thursday. I was
beginning to think that I was the subject of some existentialist experiment in permanently 
delayed gratification when Dr. Maria showed up on Friday morning, sniffed around me for a 
minute, and told me I was good to go. 
So Mom opened her oversize purse to reveal that she’d had my Go Home Clothes with
her all along. A nurse came in and took out my IV. I felt untethered even though I still had the 
oxygen tank to carry around with me. I went into the bathroom, took my first shower in a 
week, got dressed, and when I got out, I was so tired I had to lie down and get my breath. Mom 
asked, “Do you want to see Augustus?”
“I guess,” I said after a minute. I stood up and shuffled over to one of the molded plastic
chairs against the wall, tucking my tank beneath the chair. It wore me out.
Dad came back with Augustus a few minutes later. His hair was messy, sweeping down 
over his forehead. He lit up with a real Augustus Waters Goofy Smile when he saw me, and I 
couldn’t help but smile back. He sat down in the blue faux
-leather recliner next to my chair. 
He leaned in toward me, seemingly incapable of stifling the smile. 
Mom and Dad left us alone, which felt awkward. I worked hard to meet his eyes, even 
though they were the kind of pretty that’s hard to look at. “I missed you,” Augustus said.
My voice was smaller than I wanted it to be. “Thanks for not t
rying to see me when I 
looked like hell.”
“To be fair, you still look pretty bad.”
I laughed. “I missed you, too. I just don’t want you to see
. . . all this. I just want, like . . . 
It doesn’t matter. You don’t always get what you want.”
“Is that so?” he
asked. “I’d always thought the world was a wish
-
granting factory.”
“Turns out that is not the case,” I said. He was so beautiful. He reached for my hand but I
shook my head. “No,” I said quietly. “If we’re gonna hang out, it has to be, like, not that.”
“Okay,” he said. “Well, I have good news and bad news on the wish
-
granting front.”
“Okay?” I said.
“The bad news is that we obviously can’t go to Amsterdam until you’re better. The
Genies will, however, work their famous magic when you’re well enough.”
“That’s the good news?”
“No, the good news is that while you were sleeping, Peter Van Houten shared a bit more
of his brilliant brain with us.”

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He reached for my hand again, but this time to slip into it a heavily folded sheet of 
stationery on the letterhead of